Weekend Open Forum: Have you upgraded to Windows 7 yet? What is there to like/not?

Windows 7 is microsofts crowning glory, as I believe it is the best OS they have ever made. BUT! you need a rig capable of running it. Please check the minimum system requirements to run it before you choose to upgrade. It needs a lot more than vista, and when it starts up you will see why! The attention to detail is epic! And as soon as your system gets use to running it, it actually takes up less resources than vista. Congrats microsoft!

What I like a lot is the much improved boot time and, especially, how stable it is. Then again, Vista was very stable for me as well.
Another neat thing is the improved UI. Sure, some might say it's Vista with a different UI, but that different UI is exactly what makes this OS much easier to use.

The SuperBar (or whatever you want to call it) is terrific as it helps a lot when you're doing heavy multi-tasking.

I also like that going to x64 now is pretty much effortless and 32bit apps work without issues.
Best OS so far IMO! Beats Apple's OSX hands down.

Well , im using Windows 7 right now . It is quite good i should say , very nice actually . When i took in Vista when it came out . It was horrible . Annoying , compatibility issues , slow . Windows 7 has none of that . But still im hopping the Service Pack will come out soon . There is an issue i have , it kinda every now and then when you click on something it says not responding and goes away a few milliseconds later .

I decided to move from Mythbuntu 9.10 to Windows 7 Home Premium for the Media Center functionality (few showstopping bugs with sound in Mythbuntu 9.10) and have been pleasantly surprised after the disaster that Vista was (the reason I moved to Mythbuntu).

I'm running the Win7 RC1 64bit til the freebie license runs out. By then I should have the money available for the upgrade. Money issues are the ONLY issues stopping my upgrade. My wife, however, isn't that thrilled about making the move. She's still likes her XP Pro since she knows her way around it so well.

My favourite features are:
Aero snap - I always used to resize my firefox windows and place them side by side, this saves a lot of time and is great for the widescreen monitors nowadays
Desktop peek - I have the CPU and network usage gadgets on my desktop and now I can look at them without minimizing all the windows
Superbar green progress bar thingy - so far I've only seen this on explorer, IE and imgburn... but this would be really great if firefox, vuze, winamp, etc. also implemented this
Networking - It's really easy to stream media to other computers

The biggest negative I've found so far is the explorer superbar icon - there should be a straightforward option for which folder it should open on default (rather than libraries, which I find useless). Also it's a bit annoying to use if you have a lot of explorer windows open, maybe a solution would be to have an icon on the superbar for each window

Lets quit kidding ourselves. When windows 95 came out, college of dupage didn't upgrade till '97, and they were TEACHING this stuff. Last Saturday I installed windows virtual pc and DOWNGRADED to windows 95 to get some old games to run.

Whilst I am happy for so many home users to find themselves (at last) with a better OS from Microsoft, as a professional IT developer I am distinctly underwhelmed by Win7.

To me, it is simply the case that MS is dumbing down the OS to the point where they are designing virtually exclusively for the 'clueless majority', and ignoring the needs of professionals to be able to use an efficient, highly secure and configurable OS for business purposes. Professionals need to be in control of the OS, not the other way round.

In my opinion, MS need to produce an incorruptible, cast-iron secure and efficient kernel OS, on top of which they can market as many 'shell' front-ends as they like. There could be one for games, one for communications, one for graphic manipulation, one for an entertainment centre, one to be a client for a server OS, and so on ad infinitem almost.

Most importantly, MS completely ignores the huge cost to industry of retraining all users for every new OS, just because they choose to make virtually everything work differently. With the 'kernel + front-end' methodology, it would be possible to run 'legacy' front-ends for as long as necessary to support legacy applications.

There is no reason why several of these front-ends could not co-exist on the same PC, much as many people dual-boot today, but with more-or-less instant switching of course. That MS tries to do all these things in one OS is neither efficient, safe nor sensible. Enjoy your patch-tuesdays colleagues, because once win7 really gets going, there will probably be one every week......

I've been using Windows 7 since the beta and rc releases and have recently updated my computers to the final release. I'm one of those people who was happy with Vista. It had major driver problems for the first yr or so, but after that it was fine as long as you had recent hardware. Never understood why people hated it so much. Windows 7 is really just a refinement of Vista. It feels faster, has a better UI, and has been totally stable. What's not to like? I hope it's good enough to convince those XP luddites that forward progress is a good thing.

My advise is : Do NOT upgrade. make a fresh install... if you can...
If you can not, ask a friend to do it for you.
You will really see the difference if you make a fresh install.
Doing that you will probably install the last version of all the tools you use and you will know which one will be a compatibility problem.
Trust me, make a backup of all you data, emails, bookmarks, ... Check if you know all the passwords you saved in your browsers. Change them if you don't. And go...
You will find a lot a good articles on the web who explain everything to make a fresh install.

Slightly funny story: Received the package in the mail (I always want the hard copy), opened it, and read on the disk: 32-bit Version. Having pre-ordered it some time ago I'd forgotten the "both versions included" part of the deal, I thought I'd been given the wrong version! Oh no! I searched MS help, found a phone number, called and explained my dilemma, the guy apparently was going to send me a new package when I found the one teensy box on the package that said, "Includes both 32-bit and 64-bit versions." Oh yeah, I sorta remember that -- The 64-bit disk was UNDER the 32-bit one. Uh, sir, uh ... nevermind.

The install didn't go perfectly, 7 found some items that weren't compatible but didn't make it entirely clear that those items had to be manually disabled before the install could proceed (I didn't need those items anyway so, no big deal). Once I figured that out it went swimmingly, but took longer than I expected. Not longer than they SAID it would take, but I didn't believe it would take as long as that. It did.

Works great (as did Vista). Vista would occasionally choke on one program or another, but always recovered gracefully, haven't had any glitches yet in 7. 7 uses FAR less memory, from 36% at idle in Vista to ~25% in 7. I never ran low with Vista (I have more than 4 Gig, hence the 64-bit version), now I KNOW I won't run low with 7.

Nitpicks; SO much faster in some regards it's unmanageable. For example, if the cursor so much as glances on another window, that window comes immediately to the forefront, whether that was my intent or not (is there a workaround, like menu-delay in past versions?). Had to change my decade-old Alt+Tab habit to WindowsKey+Tab because Alt+Tab is entirely unuseable; Changing another habit, the Start menu, to using the task bar instead was easy enough, but I LIKED the Start menu.

Otherwise, works as well as Vista (again, I never had issues with Vista), uses less memory, changes are easy to learn -- What's NOT to like?

An operating system is just a container to run applications. The applications I want and use all run on Ubuntu and I do not need to continuously make payments to Microsoft every time they change the wallpaper.

I upgraded to 7 but my pentinum 4 was to slow :/ so I installed back to xp :/

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I don't think it is your P4, unless you have an old first gen Willamette or something. It's probably your RAM/memory and/or graphics card and it could be something as simple as a driver issue or just adding more memory.

Windows 7 is almost every bit as meaty as Vista. It really should have 2GB of RAM or more to play with. It handles that meatiness better than Vista though, with things like starting services during startup in an 'intelligent' order etc... But XP is going to run better if you have an old video card and/or less than 1GB of RAM.

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well windows 7 for general use as just web browsing worked fine as long as I turned down a lot of eye candy in the my computer properties but in games sure as warcraft 3 where on xp I reach the MAX fps of 60, I only get too 20 in win 7 and its not a stable playable 20 fps it jumps from 2-25 fps constantly.

I'm pretty sure its my p4 thats doing it, I have 4 stick 2 1gb and 2 512 mb both pairs in dual mode, and all 4 of them have the same CAS latency(5) and clock frequency of 800, and my graphics card is geforce 7900 GS which is able to play Dead Space on windows xp on high with a semi stable 16 fps. any idea why I have this performance loss?

I jumped on the pre-order deal of Windows 7 Home Premuim Upgrade and I planned on going from WinXP 32-bit to Win7 64-bit but I haven't yet because I'm still waiting for Intel to fix their 34nm X25-M firmware update!

Upgraded from Vista with Win7 Home on one computer. The annoying Vista glitches are now resolved. Win7 reminds me of XP with a makeover. Honestly if you have a good working system on XP it wouldn't be worth the upgrade to Win7. I would wait till your current XP system as a hardware failure and just buy yourself a new box with Win7 and get yourself another 5+ years out of a new rig with a good OS (Win7). High five Microsoft you got it right this time.

Installed it on a few development workstations and virtual machines. I ran the beta and RC1 (currently bootcamping the rtm I think on a white macbook). I will get it to replace my Vista HP 64bit installtion at home soon. There are 2 things I like alot - the different choices/modes for UAC and the improvements to Aero (the previews, shaking the window to minimse all others etc).

I doubt I will wait for a service pack either - Vista was dieing for one the moment it was released but Win7 is different.

Thanks to MSDN Alliance, and my university I had access to Windows 7 Professional a couple months before it's release, and ultimate RC a long time before that and I can only say I've loved it ever since.

Lot of new features over XP that makes a no choice in upgrading (In like or like). The the full install only took about half an hour, with full driver compatibility and no problem with my old XP programs, I can't recommend it enough for all of you.

The requirements are not that huge, and for today's hardware, if you have 2gb ram in your computer it will work.

Have it on my computer, my netbook, made my girlfriend install it in her netbook too (And you can see the new themes in an all-pinkish-shape), my dad laptop, and so on.